You'll never confuse him with Frank Sinatra, but in his first public speaking appearance since stepping down as Microsoft's chief executive last month, Steve Ballmer expressed having a few regrets -- but not too many to mention. (Cue the ballad.)

Speaking to students at the University of Oxford on Tuesday, Ballmer reflected on his former company's missteps and made the argument that Microsoft remained in a strong position to catch the next wave of innovation.

"The notion of taking a long-term point of view I think is the number one thing missing in most companies, big, … Read more

Xbox Music, Microsoft's music streaming product for its game console franchise, is adding music videos to the gaming console, the company said Tuesday in a blog post.

"Once a TV staple, music videos are now primarily housed on the internet, where easy access is key," it wrote, noting that when customers play a track on their Xbox One using Xbox Music, the song will automatically play as a video if it is among the 92,000 that are being added.

Vevo, a joint venture between venture between Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group with a strategic … Read more

Forbes released its annual rankings for the world's richest people on Monday showing that Gates overtook telecom mogul Carlos Slim for the first time in four years. Gates' current net worth is $76 billion, up from $67 billion last year, while Slim's fortune fell from $73 billion to $72 billion. The Microsoft chairman has held the No. … Read more

In the most extensive management shift at Microsoft since Satya Nadella took the helm -- though likely not the last -- vice presidents Tony Bates and Tami Reller will be leaving the company.

The new CEO confirmed the departures on Monday in an e-mail to Microsoft employees. "We need to drive clarity, alignment and intensity across all our work. With that as a backdrop, I want to share a set of changes to the leadership team," he wrote.

Microsoft's Xbox Live hub is one of the most robust, well-developed social gaming spheres out there, and it's about to go more mobile in a big way.

The company is looking into bringing Xbox Live to iOS and Android games, rounding out the cross-functionality of the service and extending it from Xbox consoles, Windows phones, and machines all the way to iPhones and Android handsets, according to a report from The Verge Monday.

Microsoft is about to make some big changes as to how Office 365 looks and works.

At the company's SharePoint 2014 conference, which kicks off on March 3, executives will preview some of these coming changes -- specifically ones involving social and machine-learning technologies that Microsoft is baking into its cloud suite of Office apps. Once these technologies begin rolling out later this year, the lines between Exchange, SharePoint, and Yammer will be blurred, and social collaboration will become more of a centerpiece of the more tightly integrated suite.

Google and Samsung have taken to the China Ministry of Commerce to express concern over Microsoft's impending $7.5 billion acquisition of Nokia, a new report claims.

The companies went before the Ministry of Commerce recently to say that the acquisition could give Microsoft too much control over the patent market by taking on Nokia, which has a massive patent portfolio, and thus could put competitors in a troubling competitive position, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people who claim to have knowledge of the talks.

Microsoft isn't technically taking on all of the Nokia's mobile patents in the … Read more